


Skip Code

by Susan



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:51:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1364692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Susan/pseuds/Susan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The first man Mary kills begs her not to. He mentions his wife, his children and in the last seconds before she shoots him, promises to pay her double <em>not</em> to kill him.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>How did A.G.R.A become Mary? A bit of speculation, conjecture and some canon thrown in just to confuse everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skip Code

The first man Mary kills begs her not to. He mentions his wife, his children and in the last seconds before she shoots him, promises to pay her double _not_ to kill him.

“Twice nothing is still nothing,” she says and pulls the trigger.

On the way back to her apartment, she tosses the gun and the man’s wallet in the Rideau. There are no surveillance cameras along that section of the canal, so no one ever connects her to the body that is found lying in a blooming pool of blood among the tulips.

The next morning she takes a bus downtown and calls the number he gave her from a phone booth on the corner of Queen and Bank. She reports that the job is done. That it was both easier and harder than she expected. “We’re even now,” she says. “You’ll leave me alone.” But it sounds more like a question than she means it to. The man says nothing and the lengthening silence between them makes her believe that maybe he really is done with her. That she can go back to being what she was before. That she can un-ring the bell of her own stupidity.

“We’ll be in touch,” he says finally and hangs up.

She feels something heavy shift inside her. Something dark and inevitable. She’s always wondered how it feels to be sentenced to life in prison.

Now she knows.

He leaves her dangling for nine months – long enough for her to hope that maybe he really will leave her alone. She finishes university, her Master’s degree in philosophy as useful as a “tit on a bull” according to her disappointed father. She’s offered a job on the Hill working as a receptionist in the office of the new MP from Peace River, Alberta. “We’re both rookies,” he laughs. “We’ll learn the job together.” He’s young and sincere and has no clue what he’s doing. She suspects her father has arranged this job, if only so he can say his daughter is working for the government.

She rents a too-expensive apartment close to the Parliament Buildings. She buys pale wood furniture at the IKEA in Nepean, stoneware dishes from Pier I and art posters from the gift shop at the National Gallery. She has her eye on a car she can’t afford and has booked two weeks at the Club Med in Jamaica on her shiny new MasterCard. She has a life now, or at least the makings of one. There is even a boy she meets for sushi and sex once a week. He works in one of the hundred government departments – Heritage Canada maybe, or is it Health Canada, she can never remember – that employs almost everyone in Ottawa. He doesn’t talk about his job, but that’s likely because they don’t talk much about anything. He arrives at her door Friday evenings with two orders of miso soup and the forty piece platter from Kiko’s. She provides wine (usually French, never American), clean sheets and condoms.

Sometimes, in the first moments after sex, when it’s easy for her to imagine they’re closer than they are, she hints at a past that is less than vanilla. She’s not careless or stupid enough to mention the man she left dead in the tulips, but she tells Jim how much better her life is now that it was “then.” She leaves the word hanging between them, hoping he’ll ask what she means. But he never does, and she’s both irritated and relieved.

One Friday night, their tenth or maybe eleventh together, he asks if he can tie her up. He pulls a red silk scarf out of his jacket pocket and loops it around her neck. He uses both ends to pull her to him. “Please,” he whispers in her ear.

She nods and lies down on the bed and watches him undress. When he’s naked, he sits beside her and tells her to hold out her arms. He wraps the scarf around one wrist, then the other, and lifts her arms above her head and ties the ends to the brass headboard.

She’s excited and nervous and embarrassingly wet.

“I’m getting ice. Don’t go anywhere.”

She presses her legs together and almost comes.

 

The man calls her the next week. Congratulates her on the new job, the new apartment. Says he especially likes the black dress she wore to the constituents’ dinner last week. So grown up.

“What do you want?” she asks as if she doesn’t know.

“A cell phone will arrive at your office tomorrow. Keep it charged and answer it when it rings.”

She does as she’s told. Carries the phone everywhere she goes and answers it on the first ring. There’s no one on the line the first three times and she guesses it’s some kind of test.

On Friday night, she sets the phone on the bedside table and refuses to let Jim use the silk scarf. He pouts a little, but brightens when she offers him a tube of KY and her backside. It hurts less than she expects, and when they’re done, Jim asks her to go a movie with him on Sunday afternoon.

 

The phone rings Sunday night while she’s soaking in the bathtub. She’s so startled, she almost drops it in the soapy water before she can say hello.

“We have a job for you,” he says. His accent is not British, not Canadian, not anything she can put a finger on.

“I expect to be paid this time,” she answers with more bravado than she feels. “One hundred thousand,” she adds.

He hears him talking, but his voice is muffled, like he’s holding one hand over the phone. She waits.

“We will pay expenses. Twenty thousand dollars. Canadian.”

“Fifty thousand. American.” She tries to hide her surprise that they are willing to pay her anything.

“Thirty thousand American and we don’t kill you.”

The line goes dead before she has a chance to agree.

She drops the phone on the mat by the tub and slips her hand between her legs. She comes quickly, imagining Jim fucking her against the black leather upholstery of her new car.

 

_Ottawa Citizen, Wednesday, February 21, 2002_

_AP-Peter Goodale, Member of Parliament for Peace River, Alberta, was shot and killed late last night as he was leaving his health club in downtown Ottawa. Mr. Goodale was thirty-six years old. Police report that a surveillance camera in the club parking lot had been broken for more than a week. No suspects have been identified at this time._

_Mr. Goodale is survived by his wife, Lucy. The couple had no children._

_Prime Minister Jean Chrétien expressed his shock and sorrow . . ._

The night she kills her boss, she drives home in Jim’s battered Toyota. She told him she wanted to visit her aunt in the hospital and he handed over the keys with a kiss and a smile. Told her to keep the car until Friday.

On the drive home, she stops the car twice, sure she’s going to be sick. Only she’s not. By the time she finds a parking spot a block from her apartment, the sick feeling is replaced by something exciting, something dangerous. She wishes she could call Jim and tell him everything. Only she doesn’t have to call him at all.

“Mr. Moriarty is upstairs waiting for you,” the doorman tells her. “He says you gave him the key.” He sounds faintly disapproving.

“I didn’t –”

Her door isn’t locked. Jim is sitting on the couch smiling, a sweating bottle of Labatt 50 in one hand, a white envelope in the other.

“Jim? What are you doing here? It’s Wednesday . . .”

“It’s all over the news. Well done, sweetie,” he says. He never calls her sweetie. He lays the envelope on the coffee table. “Thirty thousand, I believe.”

“I don’t understand. How do you –”

He stands up and steps in front of her. Shushes her with one finger across her lips, then pulls off her hat and undoes the zipper of her leather jacket. “Take a shower and get into bed. Tonight you graduate.”

 

They fly to London together a month later. It’s enough time for her to attend Peter’s funeral, sublet her apartment and sell her belongings. She tells her family a version of the truth – that Peter’s death has shaken her. She needs to get away.

For once, her father understands. He offers to pay her plane fare, and gives her the name of a colleague in “government” in London who might help her find a job. “He’s an odd duck, this Holmes fellow, but he has his hand in every pot. Just tell him you’re my daughter.”

The night before they leave, Jim hands her a British passport and with it, a new name and date of birth. He’s made her a year older. Bastard.

He rents a house in the countryside outside London where he plays Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. In a year, she can speak good Russian, passable Chinese and appalling Albanian. Her French will always sound Quebecois, not Parisian. He fines her ten pounds every time she ends a sentence with “eh.” She learns there are many ways to kill, not all of them quick and painless. She learns to answer to Mary.

There are other, more private, more painful lessons.

She thinks of him as Moriarty now. Jim was the boy who fed her sushi in bed and called her Anna.

Sometimes he disappears for days and she learns never to ask where. He calls himself a consultant now.

 

After she’s been in England for six months, he drops a new girl into the mix.

“This is Irene,” he tells her, though she suspects Irene’s name is almost as new as her own. “She’ll be staying with us for a while.”

Irene is her age, maybe a year or two older. Beautiful in the way Mary only wishes she could be. “Which room do I put her in?”

“Ours,” he says with a look that dares her to argue.

“Bloody hell, Jimmy,” Irene whines. Her accent places her north of Manchester, south of the middle class. Mary guesses she’s here for the full Pygmalion. “That’s not what you promised.”

“Shut it,” he warns. “Irene, say a proper hello to Mary.”

A scowl flashes across Irene’s face, but she steps forward and takes Mary’s face between her hands, then leans in and kisses her hard on the lips.

Mary pulls away. “What the fuck –”

“Language, sweetie.” He turns back to Irene. “Again. And do try to look a little less predatory this time.”

 

2010

Moriarty promises her that this assignment will be easy. Especially after the last one, which went so utterly and fantastically wrong. It was supposed to be quick – one clean shot through an open window. She’d done it countless times before – but this time her target dropped to the floor seconds _before_ she pulled the trigger. She heard someone rattling the locked door behind her and the sound of breaking glass. She dropped the rifle – she knew she’d get hell for that later – and shoved her way past the man trying to get in. He gave chase but she zigged when he zagged and lost him in the crowd.

“No, there’s no bloody way he can identify me. And no, I don’t know who he was. Never saw him before,” Mary repeated. “Tall, dark hair. Wearing a ridiculously long overcoat. And a scarf.”

“You’re describing Dr. Who.” His voice was calm, but Mary saw the vein in his neck pulsing. Bad things happened when Moriarty was too calm.

“I’m telling you I didn’t make any mistakes. I did exactly what I always do.” She backed away from him but he wrapped his hand tightly around her wrist.

“Then explain how our target is still alive. Our client will not be pleased.”

“I’ll try again in a few days. When everyone calms down and Doctor Whoever-he-is stops hovering.”

“No. I’ll finish it.”

Mary felt a surge of pity for whoever was tied to his bedpost that night.

 

As promised, this one _is_ easy, almost too easy. She chats up the target at the bar, walks him out to the empty car park, and does what she’s paid to do. Only she doesn’t really get paid anymore, does she? More like an allowance – pin money, her mother called it. Moriarty owns her flat, her furniture, her future.

Sometimes she imagines herself going off on her own, setting up her own shop, she’s got enough contacts and skills to keep her busy. But she knows he’ll never let her go – even if he owns a dozen more like her all over Europe.

Some nights she sits in her empty flat and remembers when Moriarty was still just Jim, and sex was just sex. She wonders sometimes if the choices she made were ever really hers to make. Moriarty decided for both of them. And now it’s too late to go back.

But he’s distracted lately – the man in the coat has managed to cock up two other jobs in the last month. He’s got a name now – Sherlock Holmes – and although his name sounds like something from an episode of Dr. Who, he’s quite real.

***

Three months after Sherlock Holmes throws a well-timed wrench into several of their best-laid plans, Moriarty shows up at her flat to tell her he has a new job for her.

He’s sitting at her kitchen table, eating the last of her custard tarts. “You’ve moved things since I was here last. Place is quite cozy, really. I should come round more often. Find out if you have any new interests.” He pushes the fork around the glass plate. “Do you? Have other interests, I mean.”

She wonders how he manages to make every sentence sound vaguely threatening.

“Not really, no. You keep me rather busy.” They both know this is a lie. She’s not done more than three jobs in the last two months. It’s almost as if he blames her for Sherlock Holmes getting in his way.

“I hope you can still fit me in.” He smiles his best dirty old man smile, reaches across the table, and squeezes her left breast.

She wants to pull away but doesn’t dare. He’s in a strange mood today, jumpy and changeable.

“I’ve taken on a new project,” he says. “I believe you’ve bumped into him.” He lets out what sounds like a giggle. “Literally.”

“You do know who his brother is?” She’s done her own research. “You best tread lightly.”

She feels the sting across her cheek before she sees his hand move.

“If anyone needs to tread lightly, it’s the Holmes boys. Too big for their britches by half. Someone needs to teach them both a lesson.”

She stands and puts out a hand to steady herself. She has the sense of standing on a cliff waiting to see which way the wind will blow her – back to safety or onto the rocks below. “What do you want me to do?”

“Sherlock spends most of his time lately with a Dr. John Watson – late of the Afghanistan Watsons. Lives with him, eats with him, probably fucks him too. I want to know everything about him. Leave Sherlock to me. Concentrate on the good doctor.”

“How close do I get?”

“I want to know how far I have to stick the knife into John before Sherlock starts to bleed.”

 

She does what she’s told. Follows John to and from work. To the market on Saturday, his sister’s every second weekend. She listens to his phone calls, reads his emails. Because Moriarty tells her to, she aims a rifle at him at the swimming pool and watches the pinpoint of red light dance across his chest because her hands are shaking. Because Moriarty tells her to, she applies for a job at the clinic where John works.

The last thing Moriarty ever tells her to do is kill John. No matter what happens on the roof. And for the first time in more than ten years, Mary refuses.

 

She’s a good girl. Good in the kitchen. Good in bed. Good with languages. Good with a gun. _Pick one._

Conscientious. Without a conscience.  _Pick one._

Hates Moriarty, fucks Moriarty, obeys Moriarty. _Pick one._

Watches John, hurts John. _Pick one._

Loves John.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to LyricalSoul for reading and Peg22 for the cheering section.


End file.
